Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act

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Apixio Illuminates The Pain of Recording Patient Risk Factors (Part 2)

Andy Oram | EMR & HIPPA | October 28, 2016

The previous section of this article introduced Apixio’s analytics for payers in the Medicare Advantage program. Now we’ll step through how Apixio extracts relevant diagnostic data. Providers usually submit SOAP notes to the Apixio web site in the form of PDFs. This comes to me as a surprise, after hearing about the extravagant efforts that have gone into new CCDs and other formats such as the Blue Button project launched by the VA. Normally provided in an XML format, these documents claim to adhere to standards and offer a relatively gentle face to a computer program. In contrast, a PDF is one of the most challenging formats to parse: words and other characters are reduced to graphical symbols, while layout bears little relation to the human meaning of the data...

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Let Patients Read Their Medical Records

Dhruv Khullar, M.D. | The New York Times | March 31, 2016

Sometimes, before I interview new patients, while I’m waiting for them to be transported from the emergency department to the medical floor, I play a game.
I look through their lab tests. I peruse their imaging studies. I read other doctors’ notes and recent discharge summaries. Then I guess what the diagnosis is. I know this is bad. It goes against most of what I learned about good doctoring in medical school — that the patient’s story is the core of medicine, that it’s essential for accurate diagnoses and therapeutic relationships...

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